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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Obama's Naivety on Foreign Policy

This item tosses a reality check
on the underling failure of Obama’s obviously naïve approach to foreign policy
some four years ago and only served to prove its naivety. He has also made some mistakes and some
serious omissions. However, that is
hardly a unique failing with presidents.
Clinton
certainly fumbled the Osama file and Bush slept a full year on it before it
blew up in his face.

Whoever wins in November will be
realistic about what can be accomplished and to be fair, the hand looks pretty
decent today although little of that improvement belongs to Obama at all. Sometimes neglect is a fine policy as it
allows a number of players to resolve their own issues.

In particular Egypt is on the way to been properly governed
and this will reinforce general stability in North Africa
and bring major change there. Present
fears will prove to be transient.

Whatever the outcome in Syria,
it will be hugely weakened and this is a collapse of Iranian influence however
painted.

At the same time all the Islamist
radicals in Southern Lebanon, Gaza, and Palestine who are all
self governing are simply getting older and are not keen to turn over the reins
to younger hot heads. They can also
count and can see their best and brightest leaving Dodge while Israel itself
is booming in population and economic strength.
Just how long can you rationalize sleeping in a gutter outside a palace
for the sake of a difference of opinion?
Today, they have no allies in fact besides Iran
who has had its hands cut off in Syria.

Other problems have similarly
evaporated and that includes Burma
and now prospectively North
Korea.

Iran
continues to challenge but that is the one special case needing attention as is
Pakistan. Both have annoyed and have paid a price for
that. China is on the verge of regime
change and that promises to be actually beneficial. Iran needs regime change that is
beneficial. Pakistan
needs a regime that gets back to the basics of good governance simply because
its rival India
is now pulling ahead with a vengeance.

The best that the USA may be able
to achieve is to be encouraging and that may be good enough. Remember that the weight of history is on the
side of the West and it is now overwhelming and happening rapidly. All the turmoil is merely governments and
cultures coming to grips with this and discovering how to adjust. Remember Japan
and Germany. No one wishes to emulate their glowing
example by getting forced to do the right thing at gun point. And yes, today the USA is
now a small part of the modern world even if everyone else is quite happy to
stick them with the bill for preserving perpetual military superiority.

All the way back in 2009, the newly inaugurated president Obama granted
his very first TV interview to the al-Arabiya network.

Speaking to veteran journalist Hisham Melhem, the new president said:
“My job to the Muslim world is to communicate that the Americans are not your
enemy.” As anti-American riots burn from Benghazi
to Islamabad, that hope looks distinctly “Mission Unaccomplished.”

In the immediate aftermath of the killing of the U.S. ambassador to Libya,
the Obama administration insisted that the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo
and the U.S. consulate in Benghazi were spontaneous
responses to a YouTube video clip mocking the Prophet Muhammad. That claim,
never very plausible, has by now nearly completely unraveled. (SeeEliLake’s report Friday in
the Daily Beast for the latest debunking.)

The attacks look elaborately planned and timed for the 9/11
anniversary. The raising of the black al-Qaeda flag over the walls of the Cairo
embassy was a challenge and a defiance — and a brutal repudiation of the hopes
expressed in Obama’s own speech in Cairo, delivered three summers ago:

“I have come here to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world; one
based upon mutual interest and mutual respect; and one based upon the truth
that America
and Islam are not exclusive, and need not be in competition.”

That new beginning has not arrived. President Obama can claim important
national security successes: the killing of Osama bin Laden and much of what
remained of the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. But the level of
anti-American grievance Obama observed and deplored in 2008-2009 has not
abated. If anything, the situation in important Muslim-majority countries like Pakistan and Egypt seems even more dangerous
today than when Barack Obama took office. This is not to blame Obama for
making things worse. It is to recall to mind the unrealism of his promise to
make things better.

That promise was based on a series of assumptions that have one by one
been falsified:

That the Palestinian issue
was the driving cause of Muslim anti-Americanism — and that he could resolve
Palestinian grievances by pressing Israel to make concessions; that the
anger was somehow caused by President Bush and that it could be alleviated
by reversing Bush policies; and — finally — that his own personality and
name could somehow reassure Muslims in and of itself.

[ Appeasement by any other name
always succeeds only in encouraging a dedicated enemy - arclein]

“I am a Christian, but my father came from a Kenyan family that
includes generations of Muslims. As a boy, I spent several years in Indonesia and
heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk. As a
young man, I worked in Chicago
communities where many found dignity and peace in their Muslim faith.”

These words played a variation on the theme that launched Barack
Obama’s domestic career. At home, his personal story as the son of a mother
from Kansas and a father from Kenya symbolized hopes of overcoming America’s
racial divides. Might his personal story as an American-Christian descended
from East African Muslims achieve a similar resonance abroad?

Now we have the answer, delivered by rocket launchers. No.

Again, this is not to blame Obama. He didn’t make the anti-Americanism,
and he faces few easy answers in responding to that anti-Americanism. But it
does suggest that greater humility might have been in order back in 2008-2009.
And it suggests that the problems faced in the Muslim world today go way deeper
than suggested by the glib answer, it’s all about Israel — or all about Bush.
The anger goes back way further and lies way deeper.

And it probably won’t be allayed
by anything much that the United States
or Israel
or the larger Western world can do. It will be allayed by changes inside the
Muslim world — changes that remove the incentives for local power-seekers to
agitate mobs with stories about offenses against Islam; changes that reduce the
receptiveness of ordinary people to the demagoguery of local power-seekers.
Economic development, the advance of education, the rise of forms of Islam that
are less political and more spiritual — these are the forces that will bring
change. They’ll be slow. And they are bigger than any one man, no matter how
unusual his life story; how eloquent his tongue; or how grand his self-image.

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Apr 2017 - 4.1 Mil Pg Views, March 2013 - Posted my paper introducing CLOUD COSMOLOGY & NEUTRAL NEUTRINO rigorously described, September 2010 I am pleased to report that my essay titled A NEW METRIC WITH APPLICATIONS TO PHYSICS AND SOLVING CERTAIN HIGHER ORDERED DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS' has been published in Physics Essays(AIP) and appeared in their June 2010 quarterly. 40 years ago I took an honors degree in applied mathematics from the University of Waterloo. My interest was Relativity and my last year there saw me complete a 900 level course under Hanno Rund on his work in relativity,as well as differential geometry(pure math) and of course analysis. I continued researching new ideas and knowledge since that time and I have prepared a book for publication titled Paradigms Shift&. I maintain my blog as a day book and research tool to retain data and record impressions and interpretations on material read. Do join my blog and receive Four items of interest daily Monday through Saturday.